Westminster’s Ethics Bowl Team Places Tops in Nationals

Ethics Team Places “Top 4” for the 2nd Year in a Row

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Krista DeAngelis (801)832-2682

March 4, 2008

SALT LAKE CITY – For the second year in a row, Westminster College’s Ethics Bowl Team placed in the top four at the 14th Annual Ethics Bowl National Competition in San Antonio, Texas last week.

The competition featured 32 teams from 10 regional competitions. Westminster won matches against the University of Florida, Seattle University, U.S. Military Academy (West Point), and Texas A&M before losing to Clemson by two points in the semi-final rounds. Clemson and Wright State University placed first and second in the competition, while Westminster College and Cal-Poly Pomona placed in the top four (but were not scored).

Westminster’s Ethics Bowl competitors were: Conor Walline, Nissa Roper, Blakely Neilson, Cooper Henderson and Ali Jahromi. Dr. Michael Popich served as the advisor/coach.

“In our final Clemson round, there were two cases we competed with,” said Blakely Neilson, Westminster Ethic Bowl Team member. “One was about consent guidelines for living organ donors, which was the case we presented. The other was about direct-to-consumer advertising for pharmaceuticals. A few of the interesting cases that came up in the preliminary rounds regarded end-of-life-care for pets and the pay-to-stay jail program in California.”

The Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl (IEB) is a tiered competition in which the top scoring 32 teams in 10 regional ethics bowls compete against one another at a national ethics bowl. At the national ethics bowl, participating teams compete in three matches during the morning on the day of the event. In the evening the top scoring eight teams compete in an eight-team elimination consisting of four quarter-final matches, two semi-final matches and a final match.

In the IEB, a moderator poses questions to teams of three to five students. Questions may concern ethical problems on wide ranging topics, such as the classroom (e.g. cheating or plagiarism), personal relationships (e.g. dating or friendship), professional ethics (e.g. engineering, law, medicine) or social and political ethics (e.g. free speech, gun control, etc.). Each team receives a set of ethical issues in advance of the competition, and questions posed to teams at the competition are taken from that set. A panel of judges evaluates the answers. Rating criteria are: intelligibility, focus on ethically relevant considerations, avoidance of ethical irrelevance and deliberative thoughtfulness.

For more information on the IEB, visit http://ethics.iit.edu.

Westminster is a nationally recognized, comprehensive liberal arts college. With a broad array of graduate and undergraduate programs, Westminster is distinguished by its unique environment for learning. Westminster prepares students for success through active and engaged learning, real world experiences and its vibrant campus community. Westminster’s unique location, adjacent to the Rocky Mountains and to the dynamic city of Salt Lake, further enriches the college experience. For more information, visit www.westminstercollege.edu.